Arcen Games

Other => Off Topic => Topic started by: TheVampire100 on September 11, 2015, 08:57:01 PM

Owners of the original version get a key for free. I got mine already, the Steam version is a big improvment over the standard version. However, it is also a little buggy.For those who don't know it: Immortal Defense is a very unconventional Tower defense game. It has absolut NOTHING in common with other TD games. Except, well, that you can build towers, which is the main reason why you label a game TD.But except that, the game tries everything to be not like others. And succeds. But is it also fun? Different does not mean better. But Immortal Defense is better than most TD games.ID showed me at te time I played it, that TD games can have a very deep story. Something that very other TD game lacks. IDs story is one of the best written stories in gaming history (in my opinion of course). It fuses sci-fi elements with spiritual ideas.The main idea is: If you become an all powerful, omnipotent and immortal being, what would you do with the power? And how do you interact with others?To sum it up, you play a male person from a planet called "Dukis". Your planet is part in a peaceful but small federation of different systems but someday an alien empire from a far place in space start to attack you and conquer your planets. The Bavakh are a very advanced race that uses genteic engineering to develop biological ships and powerful weapons to destroy everything in their path. You have no hope to defeat them. But another race that comes along the Bavakh as slaves, defect to your side and give you Pathdefense, a new technology to fight the Bavakh. Pathdefense allows a person to abondon their body and ascend into a higher plane, called Pathspace. In Pathspace you can see the Hyperspace routes of the Bavakh as lines and attack them their with nothing that they could do against you. For them you are merely a ghostly presence that attacks out of nothing.The player takes the place of the defender of Dukis in the hope to protect his home and his pregnant wife from the assault.

One of the main differences in this game to regular TD games is, the player fights with the towers. To be exactly, at the beginning you have no towers, you fight alone. Your cursor represents you, it is your mind and wherever you move it is where you are. If you move it closer to enemies it fire autimatically, no need to click anything. Thay way you are guarented to attack any enemy and miss no one. Other (AI) Path Defenders might come to your aid and you can see their cursor on your screen. Despite that, the game lacks an actual multiplayer which is sad.Now you may ask how towers can exist in that heavenly scenario. You are nothing except a mind. You have no building material, no arms to build something. And that's right, there are no real towers. Instead they are called "Points". Those points are manifestations of your own personality. They represent the thoughts and feelings youz have out there. You start with the fear point because fear is what drives you. The fear you could loose everything. Other points will follow and everyone reacts differently.Fear for an example is a very defensive point. He has a small range and he does little damage but he stuns enemies and can disable their special abilities.If he hits a target multiple times in a row he might even push it back. Courage on the other hand is an offensive point, it represents the overcome of fear after you've learned how to use your abilities. It shoots long range javelins that pierce multiple enemies and every level of the point adds a new javelin to the attack. The shots can even wrap around the screen.All points behave entirely different and work better on specific enemies. You can however not freely build your points. Instead you have a set point pool at each level, for an example you could start out with two fear points and one courage point. You cannot build any more than these but you may gain more. You towersgain "achievments" when they attack enemies. When the've reached a specific point (lot of damage, lot of kills) you gain a new point of the specific type.Money behaves also differently in this game. You still get money when you kill enemies, however you keep all your money on the end of a level and take it to the next one (plus a bonus so it's guarented you have always some money to spend). However, if you've lost any lives during a level you will keep less from your money. Only 50% lives mean 50% money kept. This changes also the way how you play the game. You will save a lot of money towards the end of a level so you have more int he next one.There are also no waves or anything like this. All levels are survival levels. You have a set timer and an endless amount of enemies appears during this time. When the time runs out you've won. Exception are the boss fights, when you kill the boss you win the level.

I would really tell you more why this game is so awesome but you get the best experience when you literally know NOTHING about it before you play. And I don't want to spoil anything. Trust me, it is a very deep story and the gameplay is also very deep with a lot of surprises.

The game came out several many years ago, and the guy only updated the system requirements because of the optional shaders and stuff in the steam version. You just need a computer that is not old. Better computers can ramp up the effects if you feel like doing so, though.

The developer said himself he has a rather slow and old computer.The game features multiple stages of quality and the lowest quality runs pretty good on my old 9 year old PC (that I don't use anymore but I wanted to let you know this).You can adjust the game to your liking but I'm pretty sure it WILL run.

And you can adjust it a lot more than before. The visual quality slider is still there along with the fullscreen toggle, but you can mess with how ridiculously connected indra's net is in the background, the path quality (not even sure what this affects, tbh), the antialiasing, you can even turn on/off the italics, pixel smoothing, and widescreen modes.

thank you for the information my laptop isn't old i was just asking cause yea know...its a laptop but regardless i will probably check that out when i have the time.(when I'm fed up with the escapists most like)

well I just looked at it on steam and...oh my that looks very confusing I assume that won't be the case when I get round to actually playing the game although for now what I'm going to try later tonight is bro force I played the(not officially but it may as well be) demo and enjoyed it a fair bit.

The action in ID is more intense as in any other TD game I know. Especially wit all visuals enabled it can get crowded (and because of that I suggest never to play with fully visual settings otherwise you won't see where the enemies are).You can easily adapt to this at some point and your cursor fires autimatically anyway, so you won't miss anyone as long as you are close to them.

well I just looked at it on steam and...oh my that looks very confusing I assume that won't be the case when I get round to actually playing the game although for now what I'm going to try later tonight is bro force I played the(not officially but it may as well be) demo and enjoyed it a fair bit.

You get introduced to the towers one at a time. The first...8? levels are pretty much "here's one tower" so you get an idea of how it works. Then a set of levels with a small selection and its not until later that you get all of them at once.

Visually though, a lot of the stuff you're looking at is just bells and whistles.

Yesterday I was playing the first Endless Assault level. And a funny thing happened.

Apparently I found the perfect solution somehow, since I did not die for more than 2 hours. Strategy Points damages with a percentage of the enemy units, so they scale well. What made my defenses impenetrable was Pride points though. Coincidentally, a Pride point in the right place killed over 4000 units, and its damage was more than 100 million. And since it is the only tower with such a damage, it continued to be the main damage dealer, killing more, earning more damage. This caused a deadlock.

For more than 110 minutes of my playthrough, I had all towers at maximum, placed my cursor in a corner and went to go wash dishes and walk around the house etc. I think the game would continue until eternity, if I did not get bored and sell the towers to intentionally lose the game.

For more than 110 minutes of my pay through, I had all towers at maximum, placed my cursor in a corner and went to go wash dishes and walk around the house etc. I think the game would continue until eternity, if my wife and I did not get bored and sell the towers to intentionally lose the game.

Reminds me of when I crushed Onslaught 2's Lyne map.(https://s16.postimg.org/fovnv7g3p/Lyne329b.jpg)

I beat out the next highest score by almost a billion points. The game took 6 hours.

Honestly I wouldn't spend that much amount of time on a map. It's simply boring to play the same game, the same map six hours straight. I really love Onslaught but I never wanted to put that much time or effort into it.

However, there are still records much worse, look up MMORPG Bossfights. There was a very good example on Final Fantasy 11. But there are other examples as well. I honestly don't get why people don't give up then. I it takes too long I simply would quit, it's a waste of time then.

Honestly I wouldn't spend that much amount of time on a map. It's simply boring to play the same game, the same map six hours straight. I really love Onslaught but I never wanted to put that much time or effort into it.

However, there are still records much worse, look up MMORPG Bossfights. There was a very good example on Final Fantasy 11. But there are other examples as well. I honestly don't get why people don't give up then. I it takes too long I simply would quit, it's a waste of time then.

Not to mention the nature of those fights. Raids don't even work like normal combat; they always devolve into that hideous mess of random jumbled polygons and particles flying all over the place. You cant even see what's happening, so all you do is watch a big pile of meters and click icons in certain orders.

I've played so many MMOs over the years, going back to things like the first Everquest (avoiding WoW however) and to this day I absolutely do not see the appeal of raids in these games. I just don't get it. Apparently these are enjoyable somehow. Coulda fooled me...

Honestly I wouldn't spend that much amount of time on a map. It's simply boring to play the same game, the same map six hours straight.

You assume I was actually at the computer. I wasn't.Once the towers were set up (which involved zooming in and individually placing them using keyboard for pixel perfect mouse movement) I walked away and checked in on it every half hour or so, at which times I did upgrades until there were no more to buy. Then I walked away and would check on it every hour or so until the creeps overcame my defenses.

Well, I'd have to spend money (that's what the machine gun is for: it has an infinite money sink) just so my score went up. My score could have been 87,778,112 points higher if I'd spent that remaining $4700.

On what challenge level are you playing? If you have problems, it may be too high or you have not enough cache collected in the last level.You could try to collect more medals of course.

All I can say at this moment, put the point at the upper right circle of the path. I try to play the level at this moment.

so I just discovered after trying one of the badges that love increases your personal damage....hu that map actually looks doable now to answer your questions 1 its at 70 it was default for most of the first chapter but I got bored of it so I bumped it up a bit 2 my cache is 12798.I should be able to do this in my next session after I do some experimenting with love though.

12.000 Cache is waaaay too low. I have 73.000 at that level. With at least 70.000 cache you can place Danmaku and upgrade it once after the first wave.

Use your third charge attack to attack enemies that cluster together or that are close tot he exit. If you use it, all bullets at the screen will directed at your cursor position and every bullet that didn't hit an enemy will then fly back at the screen edges again, possibly hitting more enemies. Also, this medal can be helpful (in spoiler):

Graveship Cross. You get it if you defeat the Pul Wat Aa boss fight in the first 10% of the path. Just replay the level ont he lowest difficulty and you should get it. It charges your special attacks twice as fast and since you have to spam them here, you want this.

12.000 Cache is waaaay too low. I have 73.000 at that level. With at least 70.000 cache you can place Danmaku and upgrade it once after the first wave.

Use your third charge attack to attack enemies that cluster together or that are close tot he exit. If you use it, all bullets at the screen will directed at your cursor position and every bullet that didn't hit an enemy will then fly back at the screen edges again, possibly hitting more enemies. Also, this medal can be helpful (in spoiler):

Graveship Cross. You get it if you defeat the Pul Wat Aa boss fight in the first 10% of the path. Just replay the level ont he lowest difficulty and you should get it. It charges your special attacks twice as fast and since you have to spam them here, you want this.

yea....I kinda forgot that cache carry's over so I've been spending rather madly that'll stop now of course.and yea that mission was surprisingly easy once I started spamming bursts still though...that was kind of annoying really.btw I tried the next mission with full visual effects and won but I lost 5 lives without realising and I have no idea what I managed to let through so I turned them back down to a happy medium.

Yeah, the visual effects are in my opiniopn way over the top. Whenever you kill something, important aspects ont he screen start to flash (points, enemies, your cursor), this stacks semeingly endlessy, so eventually your whoel screen gets filled with flashy graphics until you have hard time to see the enemies. or your points. Or even your cursor. Toning the visual effects down helps a lot.I've also noticed that turning shaders on seems to slow down the game a little. You won't notice it since the game runs perfectly fine but the level seem to last longer than they should and today i checked this with my stopwatch and I was right, they are several seconds longer. It's not that much but if you have REALLY long levels, this adds up. So I deactivated shaders now, visually there is not much of a difference and you won't notice an actual speed increasement but now the game runs the intended amont of time.

Yeah, the visual effects are in my opiniopn way over the top. Whenever you kill something, important aspects ont he screen start to flash (points, enemies, your cursor), this stacks semeingly endlessy, so eventually your whoel screen gets filled with flashy graphics until you have hard time to see the enemies. or your points. Or even your cursor. Toning the visual effects down helps a lot.I've also noticed that turning shaders on seems to slow down the game a little. You won't notice it since the game runs perfectly fine but the level seem to last longer than they should and today i checked this with my stopwatch and I was right, they are several seconds longer. It's not that much but if you have REALLY long levels, this adds up. So I deactivated shaders now, visually there is not much of a difference and you won't notice an actual speed increasement but now the game runs the intended amont of time.

yea and that's just at 70 I have to wonder what its like at max ill probably take a look and reset it once into my next session.might I mention that the track that plays on the menu is freaking amazing! the rest I've heard is pretty good but no were near as the intro track.

Synchronized Dino Tossing won "The Game Most Likely To Get A Spectator Eaten By A Dinosaur" award

I nominated Immortal Defense for the "I'm Not Crying, There's Something In My Eye" award

Did the same but you should put this into a spoiler because peopel who didn't play the game would except this XD

then again it might make people play it and show them that not all td games are mediocre

also id like to ask for a morsel of advice about cutters I just did the 3rd map in the chapter and it showed me in painful fashion how terrible I am at using them. I normally put them in a place surround by path and then promptly ignore them and focus on everything (I do remember to upgrade them promptly though) are they terrible like i think they are or am I missing something here?.

I haven't beaten the cut challenge myself honestly, I will redo it since I got a medal that will help me in the final level.

Cut Points themself are neither really good nor bad. they fall into a niche where you rarely will notice them: As group killers. But because of the Ortho point that is waaay easier to predict and handle, people prefer that one even if the Cut point does actually more damage.

The problem with cut point is how unpredicatable he works. On the first level he attacks the fastest but looses attack speed on every level afterwards.Even on the last one (level 7) which is for most other points the "rage mode" where they fire uncontrollably, the cut point has a rather bad firing speed. However, his attack damage is quite high than with a BIG splash radius. Even more if you got the medal (double splash). What makes him so great in that? He looses no damage on each target he hits. Other multihitters like Ortho and Courage loose damage on each enemy they hit. Cut point doesn't a fulyl upgraded and outfittet cut point can kill an entire spwn with one hit if well aimed.

And thsi is his problem: Aiming. he has none, he shoots in circles around him. And like you said, the player will ignore him for the most time because he is busy with other stuff. Strategist points help a lot because they rederict the mines to your targets. That's why you always shoul use them together if possible. If you don't have one but still want to redirect cut mines, use your charge attack. it does simply the same as a strategist point, you even can use it while it is charging to "collect" mines and move them to enemies. This is however tricky, so it's better if you simply use the charge attack instead of the charging process.

So to sum it: Cut points are situational where place them and how you upgrade them. A low level cut point fires more but weaker bullets, its ideal for a mine carpet to catch weakened enemies that slipped thorugh your other defenes. Put multiple of these towards the end of the path and they will get caught by the mines and die. Put higher level cut points at the start and the middle of the path, use your charge attacks or strategist points to direct them directly into enemies. Since he has a terrible fire rate it is very unlikely that he will hit an enemy by himself. They low level ones do and do a pretty good job at that (if you put them in circles) but not the higher, stronger ones.

keep in mind, the stronger ones are still the better ones because they do more damage and have a big radius. If you do 100.000 damage, you do it to everyone in the explosion radius. Aim for enemies int he middle of groups, not at teh start. Otherwise you wll loose effective AOE.

Also, if you don't have it already, the Eye of Corybantes (medal) can slow down enemies you hit. That won't help at cut campaign 3, but in other levels it will, since slower enemies are easiert o hit with the mines.

I hope this helpes you. Let me know if you beat the last level and how you did it.

Also, I have trouble with one boss on Challenge 100%.

Noyaties 19. Don't know how to do that. The thing disables my strongest points and switches between them very fast, leaving them almost no time to fire at all. and they grow larger to disable more towers at the same time the more hp they lost. I tried courage points, I tried fear points, turning points, cut points, nothing works. Circuit poins didn't even do damage, why the hell do you get them in this level then?

If anyone knows how you can beat it, let me know. That is, for the highest difficulty, on lower diffulties I have no troubles whatsoever.

Edit: Just finished the cut challenge. You should propably set the viual settings to the lowest because in the last level it is very hard to see enemies and you have almost no lives. You cannot allow to let even a single enemy slip, so seeing them is the key to winning. Spread out your cut points alot, put more of them toward the middle and at circles, upgrade evry single one to at leats level 3 and then upgrade one at the middle as high as possible. Spend your rest cache on strategist points, level one of them as much as possible.

They key to winnign this is to attract as many mines as possible with the strategist points, that's why you have to spread them out, otherwise you have only chokepoints and those won't work here because the neemies move too fast. It's better if you have miens aviable from every possible angle. The strategist points needs to do at least 60% damage. You have to wear them down as much as possible before they get hit by mines, so they die (hopefully) in one hit. If you notice deficits in certain areas, improve them. If an area is not covered in mines enough, build a new cut point, if mines don't do enough damage to kill an enemy, upgrade them, if you generally notice that enemies don't die fast enough, upgrade your strategist points for more percent damage. That way you should manage to win. And move around a lot, the enemies are really fast in this level and if you cannot catch up with them, you loose. Also, don't upgrade all your mines to max, you need MORE mines but also STRONG mines, therefore it is advised to have one single strong point and several cut points at level 3-4. If you have enough cache you can also buy a second or third strong cut point around level 5-6. These shoudl be in the middle so they can be attracted from any direction on the path.

I haven't beaten the cut challenge myself honestly, I will redo it since I got a medal that will help me in the final level.

Cut Points themself are neither really good nor bad. they fall into a niche where you rarely will notice them: As group killers. But because of the Ortho point that is waaay easier to predict and handle, people prefer that one even if the Cut point does actually more damage.

The problem with cut point is how unpredicatable he works. On the first level he attacks the fastest but looses attack speed on every level afterwards.Even on the last one (level 7) which is for most other points the "rage mode" where they fire uncontrollably, the cut point has a rather bad firing speed. However, his attack damage is quite high than with a BIG splash radius. Even more if you got the medal (double splash). What makes him so great in that? He looses no damage on each target he hits. Other multihitters like Ortho and Courage loose damage on each enemy they hit. Cut point doesn't a fulyl upgraded and outfittet cut point can kill an entire spwn with one hit if well aimed.

And thsi is his problem: Aiming. he has none, he shoots in circles around him. And like you said, the player will ignore him for the most time because he is busy with other stuff. Strategist points help a lot because they rederict the mines to your targets. That's why you always shoul use them together if possible. If you don't have one but still want to redirect cut mines, use your charge attack. it does simply the same as a strategist point, you even can use it while it is charging to "collect" mines and move them to enemies. This is however tricky, so it's better if you simply use the charge attack instead of the charging process.

So to sum it: Cut points are situational where place them and how you upgrade them. A low level cut point fires more but weaker bullets, its ideal for a mine carpet to catch weakened enemies that slipped thorugh your other defenes. Put multiple of these towards the end of the path and they will get caught by the mines and die. Put higher level cut points at the start and the middle of the path, use your charge attacks or strategist points to direct them directly into enemies. Since he has a terrible fire rate it is very unlikely that he will hit an enemy by himself. They low level ones do and do a pretty good job at that (if you put them in circles) but not the higher, stronger ones.

keep in mind, the stronger ones are still the better ones because they do more damage and have a big radius. If you do 100.000 damage, you do it to everyone in the explosion radius. Aim for enemies int he middle of groups, not at teh start. Otherwise you wll loose effective AOE.

Also, if you don't have it already, the Eye of Corybantes (medal) can slow down enemies you hit. That won't help at cut campaign 3, but in other levels it will, since slower enemies are easiert o hit with the mines.

I hope this helpes you. Let me know if you beat the last level and how you did it.

Also, I have trouble with one boss on Challenge 100%.

Noyaties 19. Don't know how to do that. The thing disables my strongest points and switches between them very fast, leaving them almost no time to fire at all. and they grow larger to disable more towers at the same time the more hp they lost. I tried courage points, I tried fear points, turning points, cut points, nothing works. Circuit poins didn't even do damage, why the hell do you get them in this level then?

If anyone knows how you can beat it, let me know. That is, for the highest difficulty, on lower diffulties I have no troubles whatsoever.

Edit: Just finished the cut challenge. You should propably set the viual settings to the lowest because in the last level it is very hard to see enemies and you have almost no lives. You cannot allow to let even a single enemy slip, so seeing them is the key to winning. Spread out your cut points alot, put more of them toward the middle and at circles, upgrade evry single one to at leats level 3 and then upgrade one at the middle as high as possible. Spend your rest cache on strategist points, level one of them as much as possible.

They key to winnign this is to attract as many mines as possible with the strategist points, that's why you have to spread them out, otherwise you have only chokepoints and those won't work here because the neemies move too fast. It's better if you have miens aviable from every possible angle. The strategist points needs to do at least 60% damage. You have to wear them down as much as possible before they get hit by mines, so they die (hopefully) in one hit. If you notice deficits in certain areas, improve them. If an area is not covered in mines enough, build a new cut point, if mines don't do enough damage to kill an enemy, upgrade them, if you generally notice that enemies don't die fast enough, upgrade your strategist points for more percent damage. That way you should manage to win. And move around a lot, the enemies are really fast in this level and if you cannot catch up with them, you loose. Also, don't upgrade all your mines to max, you need MORE mines but also STRONG mines, therefore it is advised to have one single strong point and several cut points at level 3-4. If you have enough cache you can also buy a second or third strong cut point around level 5-6. These shoudl be in the middle so they can be attracted from any direction on the path.

emm right so 1 I genuinely had no idea the cuts upgrade path was like that which goes to show how little attention I give but ill keep that in mind.

2 emmm well this is embarrassing I kind of fucked up and missed out that its map 3 in chapter 4 and not just map 3 ill keep what you said in mind but the mission I was referring to is a new voice.and I've been having a goddam infuriating time trying to perfect it since whether courage and cut catches those little stragglers before they reach the end seems like complete randomness and the only reason I was able to beat was by turning challenge down to 30 ill have a go at it tomorrow with what you said about cut in mind though.

Definitely.For me, I've had something similar happen 3 times with the same game (ARK). I would keep forgetting I owned it, people would ask and I would say "no" only to discover it in my library later.